China starts building new nuclear power plant after lifting post-Fukus

China starts building new nuclear power plant after lifting post-Fukushima moratorium

By Associated Press, Jan 07, 2013 04:26 AM EST

AP BEIJING â€” A utility company says it has started building Chinaâ€™s first new nuclear power plant since Beijing lifted a construction moratorium imposed on the industry to review safety following Japanâ€™s Fukushima disaster.

The facility in the eastern coastal city of Rongcheng will incorporate Chinese-developed safety features and is due to start operation by the end of 2017, according to the state-owned Huaneng Shandong Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Co.

Chinaâ€™s decision to press ahead with nuclear development runs counter to moves in other countries such as Japan and Germany, which plan to scale back or shut down their nuclear power industries.

China is the worldâ€™s biggest energy consumer, and nuclear power is a key element in official efforts to curb surging demand for fossil fuels.

Beijing suspended approval of new nuclear power plants to carry out safety reviews following the Japanâ€™s 2011 earthquake and tsunami that wrecked the Fukushima plant. That caused partial meltdowns that were the worldâ€™s worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.

The government said in October it would resume approving new nuclear power plants but said only a few would be allowed. It said the highest safety standards would be required and facilities would be allowed only in coastal areas.

The new plant will incorporate safety features developed at Tsinghua University in Beijing that are meant to allow it to shut down in emergencies without leaking radioactive material, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing the operator. The company is part of China Huaneng Group, one of the countryâ€™s biggest state-owned utilities.

The 3 billion yuan ($475 million) facility in Rongcheng, in Shandong province, will have a generating capacity of 200 megawatts, Xinhua said. The company said it broke ground in December and has poured a portion of the foundation.

The design has â€œbroad prospects for commercial applicationâ€ and can â€œmeet the needs of different countries and regions,â€ the company said, suggesting its developers might try to market the technology abroad.

Plans call for the facility to be part of a 6.6-gigawatt nuclear power complex to be built over 20 years at a cost of 100 billion yuan ($15.9 billion), Xinhua said. It said that if completed, that will be Chinaâ€™s biggest nuclear power plant.

The government said in October it wants to generate 30 percent of Chinaâ€™s power from solar, wind and other renewable sources, as well as from nuclear energy, by the end of 2015. That is up from an earlier target of 15 percent from renewables plus 5 percent from nuclear by 2020.

Chinaâ€™s 15 nuclear reactors currently in operation have 12.5 gigawatts of generating capacity and supply about 1.8 percent of its power, according to the October report on development plans. It said the world average is 14 percent.

Another 26 reactors are under construction and will add 30 gigawatts, according to the October report.

Nuclear supplies about 1.8 percent of Chinaâ€™s total power output, below what the October report said is a global average of 14 percent.

Re: China starts building new nuclear power plant after lifting post-F

"The world's first high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor" will be installed at Rongcheng in
Shandong province. Rather than using fuel rods encased in water as in most reactors,
engineers in China are building pebble-bed reactors that use billiard ball-size fuel spheres
known as pebbles. Amassing these pebbles inside the reactor creates nuclear fission, which
heats a gas. The gas in turn heats water into steam, driving a turbine. The reactor core
consists of 420,000 of these fuel spheres, and every 15 seconds one is removed and
replaced by another one. Experts say these reactors offer a safer nuclear alternative.

China has broken ground on a 3 billion-yuan ($476 million) nuclear power project that will be the first in the world to put a reactor with fourth-generation features into commercial use, a Chinese energy company said Sunday. It also marks China's latest move to speed up nuclear power development, which came to a halt after the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan in 2011. Construction of the project at Shidao Bay in the coastal city of Rongcheng, East China's Shandong province, began last month, Xinhua learned from Huaneng Shandong Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Co Ltd, the builder and operator of the plant. With a designed capacity of 200 megawatts and "the characteristics of fourth-generation nuclear energy systems," the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor will start generating power by the end of 2017, the HSNPC said in a statement sent to Xinhua via email.

Independently developed by China's Tsinghua University, the reactor has the features of "inherent safety" and "passive nuclear safety" in line with the fourth-generation concept, meaning it can shut down safely in the event of an emergency without causing a reactor core meltdown or massive leakage of radioactive material, according to the statement. The reactor can have an outlet temperature of 750 degrees Celsius, compared with 1,000 degrees Celsius that can be reached by the very-high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, an internationally-accepted fourth-generation reactor concept. It can also raise electricity generation efficiency to around 40 percent from the current 30-percent level of second- and third-generation reactors, said the statement.

If it is commercially successful, the reactor's technology and equipment can be exported to other countries in the future, said an HSNPC public relations officer who declined to be named. "That will be a great boost to China's nuclear industry, as a very high percentage of the equipment is produced domestically instead of being imported," the official told Xinhua by telephone.

The project is part of the HSNPC's broader plan to build a 6.6-gigawatt (GW) nuclear power plant that will require approximately 100 billion yuan in investment over 20 years. If completed, it would be China's largest nuclear power plant, said the official. The rest of the plan includes four 1.25-GW AP1000 pressurized water reactors and a 1.4-GW CAP1400 pressurized water reactor. The plan has not yet been approved by regulators. China Huaneng Group , China Nuclear Engineering Group Co and Tsinghua University are investors in the plant.

Originally scheduled to be launched in 2011, the construction of the project was put off after a tsunami hit nuclear facilities at Japan's Fukushima plant in March 2011, triggering a nuclear meltdown and public panic. China suspended the approval of new nuclear plants and carried out a nationwide safety review after the crisis. The government cautiously resumed nuclear project approvals in October last year in a bid to meet growing energy demands in the world's second-largest economy. Out of safety concerns, authorities vowed not to build any nuclear power plants in inland regions during the 2011-2015 period and demanded that the world's strictest safety requirements be applied to new plants.

After the Fukushima crisis, the Shidao Bay project went through on-site checks in accident prevention and emergency management and passe d government safety inspections, the HSNPC statement said. China had 15 nuclear power-generating units in operation with a total installed capacity of 12.54 GW, and another 26 units currently under construction will add another 29.24 GW, according to a government white paper on energy policy released in October 2012. Nuclear power only accounts for 1.8 percent of China's total power output, far below the world average of 14 percent, and China plans to increase its installed nuclear power capacity to 40 GW by 2015, the paper said.